Avital Ronell (left), a professor at New York U., and Nimrod Reitman, her former studentEuropean Graduate School; Redux
Updated (8/16/2018, 10:50 a.m.) with comment from Diane Davis and students. Updated (8/15/2018, 8:57 p.m.) with comment from Judith Butler.
When word broke that Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University, had been suspended for sexually harassing a male graduate student, skeptics of the #MeToo movement pounced.
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Avital Ronell (left), a professor at New York U., and Nimrod Reitman, her former studentEuropean Graduate School; Redux
Updated (8/16/2018, 10:50 a.m.) with comment from Diane Davis and students. Updated (8/15/2018, 8:57 p.m.) with comment from Judith Butler.
When word broke that Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University, had been suspended for sexually harassing a male graduate student, skeptics of the #MeToo movement pounced.
Here, they argued, was a case of feminist hypocrisy: a female scholar, influential in her field, whose sexually charged behavior with her student, 30 years her junior, was spelled out in cringeworthy detail in a leaked Title IX report. A set of allies, many associated with feminist theory, who had drafted a letter in her defense that questioned the motives of her accuser. A woman found responsible for verbally and physically harassing a graduate student advisee over three years being held up in that letter as beyond reproach.
But as details of Ronell’s relationship with her advisee, Nimrod Reitman, emerged this week, some pushed back against the narrative that feminist scholars were circling the wagons to protect one of their own.
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Even scholars who have made a career out of analyzing power and its corrosive effects will circle the wagons when one of their own are implicated. Disappointed in the lack of consistency. #AvitalRonellhttps://t.co/UEV4DRe5tk
The Avital Ronell scandal has no winners. Intellectual-haters will crow over the hypocrisy and use it to further demean Title IX. But defending her is indefensible.
In social-media posts and heated discussions, many scholars and observers seemed to agree that the Ronell case is somehow telling. But they disagreed over what it means: Were Title IX and the #MeToo movement being hijacked in a way that hurt women? Or was the incident just another illustration that anyone who has been victimized, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, deserves the protection that gender-equity law and anti-harassment campaigns afford?
Even after Ronell’s sanction was confirmed this week, it was that draft letter written on her behalf, which first circulated in June, that remained at the center of the discussion. The note, signed by dozens of prominent scholars, was dated May 11 and addressed to NYU’s president and provost. It urged that Ronell be given a “fair hearing,” cited her academic credentials, and said she might have already been damaged by the proceedings. The backlash was swift: Critics accused the signatories of creating a double standard for a woman accused of sexual harassment and of unfairly maligning the victim.
“Feminists aren’t a monolith,” tweeted Dana Bolger, a founder of Know Your IX, an organization that advocates for victims of gender-based violence, on Tuesday.
A few thoughts on this piece. First, it should go without saying that the quality of somebody’s scholarship has absolutely nothing to do with whether they harass their students. Period. https://t.co/3d8m7T4dtz
The views of the scholars who wrote the letter on Ronell’s behalf “shouldn’t be attributed to every feminist everywhere, many of whom vehemently disagree with them,” she wrote.
Beatrice Louis, an international lawyer, went further, writing in Conatus News, an online news site, that “the scholars who have signed a letter supporting Professor Ronell are sabotaging the plight of victims and the #metoo movement in ways that are truly reprehensible.”
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“There is nothing in feminist thought, activism, or belief that justifies this terrible overture of support to an accused person who seems to have been afforded due process,” she wrote.
‘Blaming the Victim’
The case exploded into the news this week when word broke that Ronell, 66, had been suspended for a year without pay after being found responsible for sexually harassing her former advisee. Reitman, who is now 34, is a visiting fellow at Harvard University. He filed a Title IX complaint against Ronell two years after graduating from NYU with a Ph.D.
Excerpts from the Title IX report obtained by The New York Times and later by The Chronicle described Ronell repeatedly kissing and touching him and calling him pet names like “baby love angel,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “awesome warrior angel.”
Reitman said she demanded that he use equally over-the-top language in addressing her. When he refused to go along with her requests, he said, she retaliated against him by refusing to return his emails or review his work.
He said the advances, which he described as unwanted, started in her Paris apartment in 2012, before she became his doctoral adviser, and continued over the next three years — in his apartment, in private work sessions, and at public conferences. He said she pressured him to sleep in the same bed, pressing against him, and at one point put his hand on her breasts. Complicating the situation is that Reitman identifies as gay and Ronell as queer.
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In May, NYU found Ronell responsible for sexual harassment and suspended her for the coming year. The monthslong probe found that her conduct was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.”
The Title IX investigation cleared her of other charges, including sexual assault and stalking.
The punishment wasn’t publicly announced at the time, and it might have gone largely unnoticed if it weren’t for the letter written on her behalf, which was obtained and published by a philosophy blog.
“We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation,” the letter stated. It also appeared to impugn Reitman, though without naming him: “Some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her.”
Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law school, published the letter on his blog in a sharply critical post.
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“Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist,” he wrote.
The first signatory of the letter was Judith Butler, a nationally renowned professor of critical theory and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley who is president-elect of the Modern Language Association. In an email late Wednesday, she said she had some regrets about the wording of the letter, which she said had been written in haste by a group of authors.
“We ought not to have attributed motives to the complainant, even though some signatories had strong views on this matter,” Butler wrote. “And we should not have used language that implied that Ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential treatment of any kind.”
When the letter was written, Butler said, the group understood that the Title IX investigation had been completed and that Ronell had been cleared of the most serious charges against her.
“When we learned that termination of employment was under consideration, we were bewildered by the severity of this possible sanction,” Butler wrote. “It seemed incommensurate with what we understood at that time to be the investigation’s outcome. We did not have access to the file or the findings, nor were we fully apprised of the facts of the case.”
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With the new revelations from the leaked Title IX report, others who viewed the controversy as evidence of feminist hypocrisy weighed in. Among them was Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, who tweeted that the letter “echoed the defenses of male harassers.”
Oh no! Mr. Reitman accused his former N.Y.U. grad school adviser, Avital Ronell, of sexually harassing him, & NYU found her responsible. But some leading feminist scholars have supported her in ways that echo the defenses of male harassers. #metoohttps://t.co/5zRnGBSCx9
In The New York Times, Reitman’s lawyer, Donald Kravet, said that he had drafted, but not yet decided whether to file, a lawsuit against both Ronell and NYU. In a written statement on Tuesday, John Beckman, an NYU spokesman, defended the university’s handling of the matter.
“When Nimrod Reitman first came to NYU’s Title IX office — two years after he graduated — the staff there took his reports of sexual misconduct very seriously and conducted a thorough investigation that concluded that he was, in fact, the victim of sexual harassment,” the statement reads.
As a result, Ronell has been suspended from the university, and any future meetings she has with students must be supervised, he says. The university is also examining Reitman’s subsequent claims of retaliation, and any violations found could result in extra sanctions.
The statement goes on to say that the threatened lawsuit Reitman’s lawyer has drawn up is unwarranted.
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“We have tried to work with Mr. Reitman to help him put this unfortunate chapter behind him, and we are sympathetic to what he has been through. However, given the promptness, seriousness, and thoroughness with which we responded to his charges, we do not believe that his filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the university would be warranted or just.”
Ronell did not respond to a request for comment; she has said in the past that she is bound by a confidentiality agreement with the university not to discuss her case. However, in an email to The New York Times, she denied harassing her former student.
“Our communications — which Reitman now claims constituted sexual harassment — were between two adults, a gay man and a queer woman, who share an Israeli heritage, as well as a penchant for florid and campy communications arising from our common academic backgrounds and sensibilities,” she wrote. “These communications were repeatedly invited, responded to, and encouraged by him over a period of three years.”
Emails sent by The Chronicle to more than a dozen of the pro-Ronell letter’s signatories went unanswered or were met this week with no comment. But in June, one of the highest-profile signatories publicly defended his support of Ronell, writing that he knew what she was being accused of and found the charges “utterly ridiculous.”
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“Avital definitely is a type of her own,” Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher, wrote. “In short, she is a walking provocation for a stiff Politically Correct inhabitant of our academia, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode.”
He argued that the professor’s “eccentricities” are all on the surface. “There is nothing sleazy hidden beneath her affected behaviour, in contrast to quite a few professors that I know who obey all the Politically Correct rules while merrily screwing students or playing obscene power games with all the dirty moves such games involve.”
To many scholars, and some detractors outside academe, Ronell’s behavior can’t be explained away as eccentricities. A close friend of Reitman’s lawyer lambasted Ronell and her defenders in a blog post.
Scott H. Greenfield, a lawyer, wrote that if Ronell had been a male professor who sexually abused a female student, “he would have been immediately fired and his career obliterated to the deafening cheers of feminist academia.”
“Forget the jargonized rhetoric about power dynamics and oppression,” Greenfield wrote. “To these feminist scholars, Title IX is just a bludgeon to beat men into submission, and they fought to protect one of their own from facing the consequences of her sexual abuse.”
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Among those who signed the letter defending Ronell was Joan W. Scott, a professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She told The Chronicle in June that the investigation was “an example of a kind of misuse or abuse of Title IX.”
On Tuesday, she bemoaned the fact that the Title IX report had been leaked. “My only comment is that the leak really taints any future Title IX process,” she wrote in an email. “No one can be confident that confidentiality will be respected — at NYU and anywhere else.”
Another signatory, Diane Davis, chair of the department of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, echoed Scott’s concerns about the case in an email to the The New York Times.
“I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice,” the newspaper quoted her as writing. “But it’s for that very reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what many of us believe is happening in this case.”
In an email to The Chronicle on Thursday, Davis wrote that the truncated version of her statement about Title IX that had appeared in the Times gave a misleading impression of her views. In between the two sentences that were quoted, she had written the following, which makes it clear, she said, that she feels Title IX protections should apply to anyone who is abused.
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“I stand with — I mean, obviously — every male, female, transgender, and nonbinary victim of abuse, sexual or otherwise, inside or outside of the academy,” her statement read. “I’m relieved, and we should all be relieved that cultures of abuse are finally being aggressively exposed and challenged everywhere.”
The letter she signed wasn’t the only one written on Ronell’s behalf. In May, 130 of Ronell’s current and former students submitted a petition to the university’s president and provost praising her as a “kind, thoughtful, and caring” teacher and mentor. Losing her, the statement said, would be “an absolute calamity for our scholarship and for the humanities at large.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
Nell Gluckman contributed to this report. She writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, student success, and job training, as well as free speech and other topics in daily news. Follow her @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.